From the course: Hashcat Essential Training
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What is Hashcat?
From the course: Hashcat Essential Training
What is Hashcat?
- [Instructor] Hashcat is a free and open source program that we can use to recover passwords for many different kinds of hashes, and that's useful because the strength of passwords is a cornerstone of digital safety. When we're using Hashcat, it's important to recognize what Hashcat can do and what it can't. It's great at cracking hashed passwords, but it doesn't decrypt information or derive private keys from public keys. Hashcat is a specialized tool that's a critical component of any cybersecurity professional's toolkit, and it's often used in combination with other specialized tools. So before we start cracking hashes, it's important to understand what a hash is. A hash is the result of applying a hashing algorithm to plain text, resulting in output that's a fixed length. When a specific piece of text is run through a given hash algorithm, the result is consistently the same. For different pieces of text the results will be different, though each input will produce consistent…
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